Fred, I may indeed have been fooled by all those theatrical hand gestures, over all these years of watching mouthharp players -- I never learned to play the thing myself, so my opinions must be taken with a grain of salt. I carried one around in my guitar case for years, but never got past using it exclusively to tune up my strings and to lend to real harp players who wanted to play along with me.

Jesse Fuller and Bob Dylan are the two most outstanding rack-harmonica players that I can think of. I haven't heard them (or anyone else) get *quite* the same effects that the best hand-held harp-only blues players can produce. So I still think there might be something to all that flashy hand-wringing.

I'm still waiting to hear more about your mom and her restrictions on your improvisational style!